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My interview with Alfre Woodard…

Alfre Woodard is set to play a very different kind of character – for her – on the new NBC series “My Own Worst Enemy” set to debut in October.

She plays the handler of a man played by Christian Slater who has two personalities: a mild-mannered family man and a cold blooded secret agent. The twist is that the family man doesn’t know the other personality exists.

This is how Alfre described it as she slipped into character at last week’s Television Critics Associaton Summer Press Tour sesson: “What we actually do is we manifest a divergent identity dormant in a sealed-off portion of the medial temporal lobe.”

Fortunately, when we spoke earlier, the conversation was a lot easier to follow!

“It’s said of me that I’m the lady decides who lives and dies,” she said of her character, Mavis Heller. “I’ve obviously been an agent in the field before and I got promoted to this position and I am Christian’s boss.”

The last time Alfre appeared as a regular on a television series, she was the mysterious new neighbor on “Desperate Housewives.” But Betty Applewhite had too many secrets to really connect with the other women of Wisteria Lane and Alfre left after one season and an Emmy nomination.

She didn’t hesitate to try series TV again.

“I’m not picky, I just make decisions,” she explained. “If this had come as a stage play or a miniseries or a movie I would have done it. It happened to be a series. I follow the material.”

And there has been some mighty good material over the years including her Oscar-nominated role in “Cross Creek” and the features “Passion Fish” and “Down in the Delta.”

She’s also earned an astounding 15 Emmy nominations – including four wins – for such films as “Mrs. Evers Boys,” “The Piano Lesson,” “Gulliver’s Travels” and “The Water is Wide.” She was nominated again earlier this month for her performance in “Pictures of Hollis Woods.”

With such a stellar resume, I wondered if the 55-year-old Alfre is constantly flooded with scripts after all these years.

“I sort of got into this intending to go the long haul So I’ve always made my decisions based on not only what interests me, but with an eye out for longevity,” she said. “So I’ve never been flooded but I’ve always consistently had offers.”

So what makes her say “yes” to a project?

“I’ve always said I wouldn’t do anything that I wouldn’t go to see so that kind of knocks out a lot,” she said. “Work is hard and you leave your family for it sometimes. So when I look something and I feel like it’s something I can do and I thought of something that probably no one’s going to think of to bring to that, then I’ll go to work.”

Alfre can disappear into a role but she also cuts a very glamorous figure on red carpets. But as someone who still considers herself more of a working actress than a star, she doesn’t take that part very seriously.

“Any time you’re not at work, it’s sort of make-believe,” she said. “Work is real, even though you’re pretending to be a person. All the rest is frivolity and frivolity is always fun but at the end of the day, I don’t feel that anything I do outside of my set is going to make a difference in the world. So I take it like fun. When it’s not fun, you go home.”